I struggled to find much of
an idea behind this Strauss and Beethoven programme. Both Tod und Verklärung and the Fifth Symphony open in C minor and close
in C major, but their trajectories are very different: perhaps that was the
point? Maybe it was just a matter of having Andris Nelsons and Angela Denoke
available on the same evening. At any rate, if the combination did not especially
enlighten, nor did it jar in the sense that the briefly-popular Eroica-plus-Ein Heldenleben did. (How could the latter work not pale by
comparison, even if one did not tire of E-flat major?)

Nelsons has built quite a
reputation already as a Straussian. However, on this occasion and to my ears,
it was only intermittently fulfilled. The ‘heartbeat’ to the opening of Tod und Verklärung was as aural-pictorially
convincing as Strauss could ever have hoped for: tribute of course to the
Philharmonia’s excellence as much as that of Nelsons. Moreover, that figure was
properly integrated in musical terms; it did not simply stand out as an ‘effect’.
The soft, sometimes very soft, playing drew one in, despite a
less-than-well-behaved audience. Unfortunately, what had sounded as though it
would be a very fine performance lost its way somewhat, vehement assertions of
the hero’s life coming across in all too hard-driven a fashion. The brass
sounded uncharacteristically crude, clearly acting under instruction. It might
have been Sir Georg Solti conducting, were it not for Nelsons’s hyperactive
podium manner. (The problem with such things is that if the musical results are
good enough, for instance in the case of Bernstein at his best, no one will
care; the moment they are not, the manner will irritate. And in general, it is
difficult to imagine the greatest conductors – Furtwängler, Klemperer, Kleiber père or fils, Boulez, et al.,
jumping around in demented fashion.) What was lacking was a stronger sense of
overall line, indeed of (post-)symphonism. Still, the performance certainly did
not deserve its blighting by a mobile telephone; leader, Zsolt-Tihámer
Visontay, whose solos had been exquisitely taken, was not the only orchestral
musician to glare into the audience at that point. At least the Philharmonia’s
glorious echt-Straussian glow offered
some ultimate compensation. Moreover, Nelsons’s shaping of the close, a little
orchestral untidiness notwithstanding, showed significant return to form – in more
than one sense.

Interestingly – and not necessarily
unusually – Nelsons seemed more relaxed, certainly more fluent, as ‘accompanist’.
Denoke is not possessed of the most ideally soaring of soprano voices for
Strauss, yet from the opening of Das
Rosenband she communicated the words most ably. Is that enough? Perhaps not
in this case, ultimately, for as Julian Johnson remarked in his excellent
programme note, in Strauss’s vocal music, it is often ‘the rich quality of the
voice itself that seems to embody what the poem promises’. Nevertheless, there
was much to enjoy, not least in the Philharmonia’s ability to offer almost ‘chamber’-like
transparency without reduction in string forces. The orchestral stirring of the
wood in Waldseligkeit sounded nicely
Wagnerian, Siegfried in particular
coming to mind; it was good to hear the harmonium too. However, it was in this
song, that Denoke’s enunciation became less distinct. Matters were put right in
Ruhe, meine Seele! If her soprano
remained somewhat hard-edged, she marshalled her resources well, turning the
song arrestingly – even if this should not be how one would always wish to hear
it – into something approaching a musico-dramatic scena. Again, Wagnerian harmonic echoes in the orchestra were well
conveyed. Orchestral warmth, including delectable solos on flute (Samuel Coles)
and violin (Tihámer-Visontay) was a hallmark of Allerseelen, though arguably it dragged a little. Cäcilie, however, sounded reinvigorated,
from the magnificent wash of orchestral sound with which it opened onwards.
Denoke’s operatic experience was put to good use in communication of meaning,
though her intonation was not always spot on. Zueignung was offered as an encore; if one could not help but long
for a Jessye Norman or a Gundula Janowitz, one could still appreciate the
musical and verbal acuity of Denoke’s account. What a pity, then, that a vulgar
audience member saw fit to bawl ‘Bravo!’ before the orchestra had ceased to
resound!

Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony is
an extraordinarily difficult piece to bring off, partly on account of the great
performances from the past that retain their hold in our memories, individual
and collective, partly on account of the stature the work has accrued in our
general cultural consciousness, partly on account of its intrinsic performative
difficulty: there are so many awkward ‘corners’ to navigate, even before one
begins to consider vexed questions of meaning. (Of course, to separate score
and meaning is already to fall short; the latter is not somehow something to be
‘applied’ once the notes are there. A still worse course is somehow to pretend
that there is no meaning; that this is just a collection of notes, a superior
sewing-machine pattern.) Nelsons’s first movement did not start off badly at
all. There was nothing objectionable –today, alas, that itself is almost a mark
of distinction – save for his strange reluctance to give full due to the first
pause of the opening motif, both at the opening and upon its every recurrence.
(One can still observe a distinction between the first paused note, a minim,
and the second, a minim tied to a second minim, without sounding peremptory, as
here.) Everything was well executed and there was highly creditable depth once
again to the Philharmonia’s sound. Formal concision certainly came across. And
yet, there never quite seemed to be enough at stake; there was little sense of
struggle, and Beethoven without struggle really is not Beethoven at all. The
coda was excitable rather than awe-inspiring, that initial wrench to the tonic
minor barely registering. Once again, podium hyperactivity began to irritate; I
could not help but wish for a little of the sobriety of Wolfgang Sawallisch, to
whose memory this concert was dedicated.

Some unfortunate woodwind
slips – much to my surprise – marred the slow movement early on. Nelsons’s
overly-moulded direction of the opening cello-section solo made for somewhat
uncomfortable listening too, despite commendably rich cello tone. Ultimately,
this proved to be episodic, harking back to the Strauss performance; the longer
line was not maintained as it might have been. It was not too grievous and
indeed there was a sense of real dignity to some of the episodes, but with
Furtwängler, Klemperer, Kleiber, Boulez, Barenboim, et al. in the back of one’s mind, it was difficult not to wish for
more. A barrage of coughing ensued once the movement had concluded, offering odd
preparation for the scherzo. It was
really rather fine first time around: implacable, defiant, mysterious. Above all,
it was harmonically grounded. The hushed reprise suffered a little from
imperfect balancing, though one could ‘fill in the gaps’ aurally without too
much ado. The transition to the finale was not helped by a further outbreak of
bronchial terrorism; it nevertheless promised much.

Unfortunately, that sublime
moment of arrival was blunted by a lack of gravity, excellence of orchestral
playing notwithstanding. Nelsons once again proved too excitable. His basic
tempo, whatever the dreary empirical ‘truth’ of the metronome, simply sounded
hasty. Rejoicing was more suggestive of an end-of-term party than
musico-metaphysical victory or presumed victory. There were fine moments, but
moments alas are not enough. Without the greater whole, the heavens will not be
stormed and shivers will not be sent down the spine. Despite this relative
disappointment, I shall not give up hope yet that we might one day hear a fine
Beethoven Fifth from Nelsons; perhaps it is just too early. A little reading of
Wagner’s wonderful essays, On Conducting
and Beethoven, would do no harm in
the meantime. Better still, he – and we – should listen to Furtwängler.

ENO’s advertising emphasises
the ‘25th anniversary year’ of Jonathan Miller’s staging of The Barber of Seville. It holds the
stage well enough without offering any especial insight – at least by now. The
programme book mentioned commedia dell’arte:
Tanya McCallin’s designs are of that world, certainly, even if there does not
seem to be a great deal in Miller’s production that goes beyond the general ‘look’
of that tradition. Unlike many endlessly revived productions, this, then, is
not in itself particularly tired, and one can readily imagine it offering the
opportunity for new casts to come in and assume their roles without a great
deal of stage rehearsal. By the same token, when compared with, for instance,
John Copley’s considerably more venerable Royal
Opera La bohème, which I happened
to see earlier in the month, the staging does not especially sparkle,
enlighten, or indeed charm either. It would do no harm to have a little Regietheater cast Rossini’s way. Either
that, or assemble a cast whose sparkle would lift the work above the merely
quotidian.

I say ‘the work’, but this
performance, unfortunately, put me in mind of Carl Dahlhaus’s ‘twin musical
cultures’ of the nineteenth century: too clear a distinction, no doubt, but
nevertheless heuristically useful. On the one hand, one has the culture of the
musical work, as understood in an emphatic sense, that of Beethoven and his
successors; on the other, one has ‘a Rossini score ... a mere recipe for
performance, and it is the performance which forms the crucial aesthetic arbiter
as the realisation of a draft rather than an exegesis of a text’. The problem
was that this performance, taken as a whole, simply did not sparkle as Rossini
must. One therefore became of the score as a decidedly inferior, indeed
well-nigh interminable work. Repetitions grated and a good part of the audience
was espied, furtively or less furtively, glancing at wristwatches. If Rossini’s
‘musical thought hinged on the performance as an event,’ then this was an
unhinged performance – and not, alas, in the expressionistic sense.

Jaime Martin’s conducting
started well enough. There was throughout a welcome clarity in the score; this
was not, at least, Rossini attempting and failing to be Mozart or Beethoven. Give
or take the odd orchestral slip, there might have been much to enjoy in the
contribution of the ENO Orchestra, considered in itself. However, impetus was soon lost, and any ‘purely
musical’ tension soon sagged. Whether the first act were actually as long as it
felt, I am not sure, but many during the interval opined that it seemed as
though it was never going to end. If Rossini’s repetitions as opposed to
development serve a dramatic purpose, one can readily forget them; here they were
apparent in unfortunately lonely fashion. I could not help but mentally
contrast the extraordinary use to which Beethoven, for instance in the Waldstein Sonata, puts simple tonic and
dominant harmony, to the tedium induced on this occasion. For some reason, the
fortepiano was employed as a continuo instrument: a strange fashion, which has
enslaved musicians who would never think of using it in solo repertoire. Performance,
then, failed to elevate the ‘work’. At least the English translation, by Amanda
and Anthony Holden was a cut above the average.

The greater fault in any case
lay elsewhere, above all in Andrew Kennedy’s Almaviva. His casting seemed
simply inexplicable. Almost entirely lacking in coloratura, let alone
Florez-like facility therewith, he resorted to mere crooning, a state of affairs
worsened by the application at seemingly random intervals of unnervingly thick
vibrato. His stage presence was of a part with his vocal performance. Benedict
Nelson’s Figaro started off in reasonably convincing fashion, but by the end
was somewhat hoarse and throughout lacked the pinpoint precision that might
have lifted the performance. By contrast, Lucy Crowe was an excellent Rosina.
Her coloratura was impeccable, her gracious stage presence no less so. Andrew
Shore reminded us of his skills as a comic actor in the role of Doctor Bartolo,
and Katherine Broderick also took the opportunity to shine as Berta. Sadly, the
increasingly lacklustre conducting and the embarrassing performance of Kennedy conspired
to negate those positive aspects of the performance, rendering one tired with
the ‘work’, however it were considered.

Having ‘unwrapped’ Beethoven,
Chopin, Mozart, and Brahms, Kings Place has turned in 2013 to the greatest
composer of them all, Johann Sebastian Bach. Even for a year-long festival,
much of Bach’s voluminous surviving output will remain unperformed, but there
is certainly a good deal on offer throughout the year. Here we heard a pair of
cantatas and a pair of concertos, those old Bach hands in the Academy of St
Martin the Fields joined by soprano, Carolyn Sampson.

Three out of the four works
featured a prominent role for flute, hence Michael Cox’s soloist billing. He
and Sampson proved nicely matched in the opening Non sa che sia dolore, a rare instance of Bach in Italian, if
indeed it is by Bach at all. (It sounds as though it is.) The ASMF’s Sinfonia convincingly
plunged us into the musical thick of it, the orchestral contribution being perhaps
the finest I have heard in this cantata. Despite the small numbers (strings
4.4.3.2.1), there was requisite harmonic depth to the aria, ‘Parti pur e non
dolore’, possessed of a fine sense of inevitability. Rhythmic precision did not
come at the cost, as so often it does nowadays, of a hard-driven performance;
there was nothing unyielding to any of the movements. There was occasionally
something a little woolly to Cox’s tone; I wondered whether this were a hat-tip
to the Baroque transverse flute. Whatever the truth of it, it did not perturb.
Sampson’s tone was bell-like in its clarity without that entailing a lack of
femininity; it seemed thoroughly apt for a secular cantata. Vocal and
instrumental exuberance were not bought at the cost of the weird exhibitionism
that sadly characterises so much present-day Bach performance.

The orchestra was pared down
further for the ‘Triple’ Concerto for flute, violin, and harpsichord (strings
4.3.2.2.1). Again, despite the small numbers, i was immediately struck by the
harmonic depth of the ASMF’s performance. And what a relief it was to encounter
sensible tempi in an age that often lauds as ‘exciting’ breakneck performances
that never so much as permit Bach’s music to breathe. Balance between the
soloists was well-nigh ideal: not clinically so, just apparently ‘right’. The
first movement even had me come close to leaving on one side my dislike of the
harpsichord as a solo instrument, so convincing were Steven Devine’s shaping of
phrases and projection. Devine, Cox, and Stephanie Gonley all displayed
admirable flexibility within a stricter overall framework. In the slow
movement, the harpsichord (inevitably?) tended towards the merely ‘tinkling’; I
longed for the sustaining power of the piano, but that was hardly the soloist’s
fault. Gonley’s violin sounded wonderfully viola-like in its richness of tone.
Again, balance was exemplary. Bach’s ‘learned’ counterpoint made its point in
the finale, but so did his equally fine melodic genius in a shapely, stylish
performance. If the harpsichord solos were at times a little clattering, that
again was the fault of the instrument, not the performer.

The ‘Double’ Violin Concerto
was the only disappointment of the evening. All three movements, but especially
the outer two, were driven far too hard. Bach had no opportunity to breathe.
The opening movement sounded as if a modern Vivaldi performance had been transferred
to Bach’s music. ‘Calm down!’ one wanted to tell the players. Even the slow
movement was harried – and Bach should be no more harried than Mozart.
Ultimately, it proved prosaic, charmless even. O for the Oistrakhs...

Ich
habe genug was given in
its later version for soprano and flute (and should therefore have been marked
in the programme as BWV 82a, not 82).
The replacement of the original oboe with the flute makes the music less
plangent, and a soprano can never hope to project the gravity of a Hotter or a
Fischer-Dieskau. Nevertheless, this was a fine performance on its own terms,
which certainly brought with it different Passion resonances. Again the depth
of orchestral sound, doubtless assisted by the excellent Hall One acoustic, was
crucial to the performance’s success. Recitative was supple, and if ‘Schlummert
ein’ has been taken more slowly, it certainly did not fall prey to the
inappropriate turbo-drive of the Double Concerto. Might not an organ, though,
have been a better choice of continuo instrument than the harpsichord? Sampson’s
low notes could not have the resonance of, say, John Shirley-Quirk in his great
recording with Sir Neville Marriner and the ASMF, but this remained a moving
account. The fast tempo of the final aria, ‘Ich freue mich auf meinen Tod,’
worked very well, both on its own terms and as a response to the strange Pietist
words, a Christian never being at home in this world. Ornamentation was
flawless, without loss to Bach’s humanity.

The Takács Quartet, Wigmore
Hall Associate Artists, is this week offering two concerts in which a Brahms
quartet and a Haydn quartet are presented with a Brahms quintet. Friday’s
concert will bring Brahms’s op.51 no.1, Haydn’s op.76 no.5, and Brahms’s Piano
Quintet (with Charles Owen). This concert had the second of Brahms’s quartets,
Haydn’s ‘Sunrise’ Quartet, op.76 no.4, and the G major Quintet, for which the
Takács players were joined by violist Lawrence Power.

Brahms’s A minor Quartet
opened in cultivated fashion, the players offering a flexibility that would
pervade the performance as a whole. This was not the most richly Romantic
Brahms, and there was perhaps a degree of loss in that, but there were gains
too. Certainly that unexaggerated flexibility of tempo in the first movement
and beyond seemed consonant in the best, that is un-slavish, sense with what we
know of Brahms’s own performing practice in his music. A fine balance was
upheld and explored between themes, motifs, and fragments – at times, almost
Webern-like – and the longer line, the overall cumulative effect very much that
of the ‘developing variation’ Schoenberg discerned in Brahms’s music and his
own. Form was properly dynamic in conception and execution. The second movement
was again very well-judged, part-way between Schumannesque intermezzo and
something ‘later’ – always a concern in Brahms. ‘Dramatic’ outbursts made their
point, yet were seamlessly integrated into a greater whole. There was
melancholy, to be sure, but not, as in Nietzsche’s cruel jibe, ‘melancholy of
impotence’, likewise in the third movement, its opening dramatically pregnant,
its later counterpoint handled lightly yet without being underestimated.
Counterpoint was afforded greater weight in the finale, in a reading of
increasing cumulative power, which, tensions beneath the surface
notwithstanding, yet retained a certain Viennese elegance.

Haydn’s ‘Sunrise’ Quartet
sounded from its opening bars, as it should, as though Haydn were very much
part of the same tradition as Brahms and yet in a sense more ‘timely’, less ‘late’,
in his exploratory Classicism. The first movement showed admirable display for
Haydn’s concision and spirit; if I have heard more extrovert performances, this
nevertheless could not help but make me smile. Every note counted, as it must.
Interplay between slow opening material – the apparent ‘introduction’ that is
actually the beginning of the exposition proper – and what follows proved
almost operatic, Mozart not so distant. The slow movement was heard as if in
one, immensely variegated, breath, a model of intelligent and inviting Haydn
playing. Infectious Schwung
characterised the minuet, though its reprise suffered somewhat from imperfect
intonation; the trio offered a delightful sense of partially deconstructed
rusticity. There was again a Mozartian – well, almost Mozartian – poise to the
final movement, but the rigour to the working out was unmistakeably Haydn’s
own, as were the surprises.

Tuning was, rather to my
surprise, a little wayward from the cellist in the opening of Brahms’s G major
String Quintet; that had been rectified the second time around. The performance
as a whole did not quite seem to hit its stride until the second subject, the
opening material sounding slightly forced in its projection. It was a joy
throughout, though, to hear that extra richness afforded by the addition of Power’s
viola; if ever a composer were likely to benefit from such an opportunity, it
was surely Brahms. The flexibility of the opening quartet was once again very
much in evidence, especially dring the development and recapitulation. What one
might call ‘detailed intensity’ came to the fore in the second movement, which
nevertheless retained a sense of overall simplicity, however deceptive, almost
akin to a superior ‘song without words’. The febrile quality to the third
movement seemed just right: unstable and yet ultimately fulfilling, redolent
once again of the worlds of Schoenberg and Webern. However much he might try,
Brahms at his ‘late’ juncture cannot recapture Haydn’s unbounded joy. High, if
mediated, spirits registered all the same in the finale.

The
Jerusalem Quartet’s latest visit to the Wigmore Hall opened with a sunny
performance of Wolf’s Italian Serenade.
Full of life, there was, as ever with this quartet, never the slightest hint of
routine. Mediterranean sun was to be felt – especially welcome in February –
but quite rightly, this was sunlight as remembered from northern Europe. Solo playing,
first from Kyril Zlotnikov’s cello, then picked up by his colleagues, was as
fine as the ensemble work.

One of
Mozart’s Prussian quartets, that in B-flat major, KV 589, followed. Cultivated
yet vital, warm yet clear, this was an excellent account, both of the first
movement and the quartet as a whole. Cello solos – the king of Prussia favoured
in Mozart’s scoring – were beautifully despatched without standing out unduly:
far more a foundation for contrapuntal exploration. An excellent Mozartian
balance was struck between ‘late’ simplicity and ‘late’ (Bachian) complexity,
both contrapuntal and harmonic. Lyrical elegance was the hallmark of the relatively
relaxed slow movement, though how much art conceals art here, both in terms of
work and performance. The cello was necessarily first amongst equals, but ensemble
was the real thing. A gracious yet far from sedate tempo – just right for ‘Moderato’
– permitted the minuet’s detail to emerge meaningfully, and what detail there
is here! With a proto-Beethovenian sense of purpose, this amounted to a
well-nigh ideal performance. The finale has one of those very tricky Mozartian
openings, in which the players must begin in
medias res; almost needless to say, it was effortlessly navigated, drawing
us into a wonderfully ‘late’ marriage of ebullience and vulnerability,
contrapuntal severity and sinuous melody. Every note and every connection
between notes was played with evident belief. Schoenberg would have understood –
and approved.

Smetana’s
first quartet offered quite a change of mood for the second half. Immediately
one heard a more Romantic tone, Ori Kam’s opening viola solo richly expressive,
likewise the other parts’ responses thereto. Performed on an almost symphonic
scale, the development section in particular, the first movement exhibited a
proper, indeed thrilling, sense of what was at stake. The ‘Allegro moderato
alla polka’ captured perfectly the balance between rusticity and art. Depth of
tone in the various solos sometimes had to be heard to be believed. Emotional
intensity characterised the slow movement from the outset, that intensity
crucially allied to an unerring instinct for harmonic rhythm. Together, those
qualities meant that however high the temperature – and sometimes it was high
indeed – the music never became over-heated. The finale opened with polished
brilliance. If it lacked the weight of previous movements, that is a reflection
upon the score rather than the performance: Smetana’s apparent attempt to adopt
a Haydnesque strategy, whatever the autobiographical explanation, works less
than perfectly, as is confirmed by the more overtly Romantic ending.

As an
encore, we heard Shostakovich’s quartet transcription of the Polka from his
ballet, The Age of Gold. Coming as it
does from the composer’s more experimental youth, it proved far more
interesting than most of his subsequent essays for these forces. Certainly the
Jerusalem Quartet proved more than equal to its abrupt changes of mood, without
imbuing them with inappropriate weight and ‘meaning’.

What a pleasure to attend a
performance in which everything comes together, there is nothing to which to
object, in short to attend a performance that is a credit to all concerned:
director, conductor, orchestra, singers, the Royal Opera House itself! John Copley’s
production, here revived by Bruno Ravella, may be nearing forty years old, and
in the abstract I should definitely be highly suspicious of a staging that had
lasted nearly so long, but it is revived with such belief, such attention to
detail, such joy in the work, that it exhibits more life than many a first night,
let alone a first revival. The locations might be as we expect, or rather as we
imagine, somehow clicking perfectly with how we always imagined Puccini’s Latin
Quarter or the Barrière d’Enfer, but there is nothing wrong with that; no one
needs La bohème, or indeed anything
else, to be set in a supermarket just for the sake of it. The singers are well
directed, credible and often rather more than that as actors. Crowd scenes are
equally well handled. Little additional details, for instance Musetta taking up
her billiard cue at the Café Momus and successfully potting her ball, add the
occasional delight or amusement, without in any sense detracting from the drama.
No Konzept? Well, there are always
other directors for something more provocative – and Stefan Herheim’s
production, now available on DVD, of course demands to be seen.

Alexander Joel, making his
Royal Opera debut, was a new name to me. On the basis of his lively, vital
conducting, I hope that I shall hear him again soon. No particular ‘points’
were being made about the score; it was simply treated with respect, allowing
the many fascinating aspects of Puccini’s scoring and his musico-dramatic
intelligence to shine through. Wagnerisms and modernisms were not underlined;
they manifested themselves anyway. If only he had not paused for applause
during acts, but then I have never heard a conductor who did not; more’s the
pity... Orchestra and chorus were on excellent form throughout, with nary a
hint of the Saturday matinée routine.

Anita Hartig proved a
touching Mimì. Again, there was no especial ‘point’ being made; one took her
character and lived with it, Beautifully sung, well acted: one could hardly
have asked for more. Teodor Ilincai (Rodolfo) certainly has the instrument for
this repertoire; his acting impressed too. He sometimes, however, had a
tendency to sing at full throttle with the lack of tonal and dynamic differentiation
that gives tenors a dubious name. I can see no reason, however, why that should
not be successfully worked upon. Gabriele Viviani made a thoroughly musical
impression as Marcello. Sonya Yoncheva’s was a vocal and stage delight, from
beginning to end, the character fully inhabited and represented. There is
nothing secondary about this ‘second cast’; its coherence puts a great number
of starrier casts to shame. And there is nothing secondary about Copley’s
production either. Quite a tonic for a cold February afternoon, enough to melt
the coldest, most cynical of hearts!

Médée was Marc-Antoine Charpentier’s sole work
written for the Académie Royale de Musique, the legacy of Lully’s operatic
monopoly having died hard. Though not a popular hit, unlike, say, Alcide and Didon,the theme of
Thomas Corneille’s libretto and Charpentier’s response thereto almost certainly
proving too much, too ‘immoral’ for many Parisian sensibilities, the opera
certainly proved a critical success upon its first performances in December
1693. Sébastien de Brossard, priest, music theorist, and composer, went so far
as to describe it as ‘the one opera without exception in which one can learn
those things most essential to good composition.’ Louis XIV, erstwhile avid
Lulliste, was impressed, complimenting Charpentier personally upon the opera,
whilst the king’s brother, Philippe, Duke of Orléans, ‘Monsieur’, and eldest
son, Louis, the Grand Dauphin, both attended several performances. Though
hailed by the critics on its first outing, Médée
seems to have received no further performances at the Paris Opéra after 1694.

Does it deserve better this
time? Yes, I have no doubt that, even if Rameau were unaware of it – the evidence
seems tantalisingly unclear – that it is nevertheless not only a fine tragedy
in its own right but, in retrospect, a crucial stepping stone on the
teleological path that takes us not only to Rameau but to Gluck, and thence of
course to Mozart, Berlioz, and Wagner. Alas, the cast was left to shoulder the
burden on its own on this occasions, receiving scant support from either the
pit or the staging. So whilst some excellent singing will doubtless have won a
few welcome converts to the cause of tragédie
lyrique, much of what was seen and a typically perverse conception of
so-called ‘period style’ from the conductor – do conductor and director ever
stop to consider how irreconcilable their stances are with each other? – will also
have had many wonder what the fuss was about. My enthusiasm for the work was
certainly not shared by a couple of friends to whom I later spoke; given the
circumstances, I cannot say that I blame them.

The lion’s share of the
responsibility should be lain at the door of Sir David McVicar. Taking up the
recent tendencies in his stagings and extending them, at times to the point of
absurdity, what we witnessed was a camp monstrosity, relocated to the 1940s for
no apparent reason, save to permit an endless display of military uniforms,
secretarial staff, and the dancing boys and girls within them. A point might
well have been made about war and wartime exigency, but it was not; the
updating seemed merely a matter of arbitrary ‘colour’. The nadir was perhaps
reached with the arrival on stage of a large pink aeroplane at the end of the
second act, whilst Cupid darted around as a nightclub singer, an unfortunate
reminiscence, even if unintentional, of the recent ENO Giulio Cesare.

Spectacle could perfectly well
have been harnessed to dramatic effect, just as it might have been in late
seventeenth-century France; however, it was not. I was put in mind of Wagner’s
furious accusation in Opera and Drama against
Meyerbeer; opera had degenerated into an ‘outrageously coloured,
historico-romantic, devilish-religious, sanctimonious-lascivious,
risqué-sacred, saucy-mysterious, sentimental-swindling, dramatic farrago’. The
only moments of real drama emerged as if by default, the endless comings and
goings on stage thinning out for a while, and Charpentier’s music just about
emerging on its own terms. When that happened, however, it did not last for
long, the brief moment of concentration upon Médée in the third act giving way
to the bizarre appearance of hellish creatures who, in a non-mythological
context, seemed more like writhing refugees from a second-rate episode of Dr Who than tragic figures of dread. The
dance routines, however well executed, seemed tone-deaf to Charpentier’s music
and quite unaware of the dramatic
role that dance should play in this repertoire. Some time immersed in a
seventeenth-century manual, if only to reject its prescriptions, might have
been well spent.

If opera is held to be mere ‘entertainment’
– and not very entertaining entertainment at that – then there seems little
case for public subsidy at all; if treated more seriously, more daringly, more
provocatively, more shockingly, then it justifies itself handsomely as public
discourse. German houses tend to understand that. Our London houses show some understanding
of that from time to time; if only McVicar, undoubtedly a master of his craft in
terms of having singers and actors do what he would, might shed the disturbing
anti-intellectualism that has pervaded so much of his recent work and go beyond
mere crowd-pleasing spectacle. Rightly or wrongly, the Prologue was omitted
entirely.

Christian Curnyn’s conducting
will doubtless be lauded in certain quarters. There was a far from unimpressive
ebb and flow to it, the boundaries between air, chorus, and recitative properly
brought into question, even dissolved. That undoubted achievement could readily
have formed the basis of a fine performance. The great pity, however, just as
in Giulio Cesare last autumn, was ‘period’
obsession: puritanical elimination of vibrato, refusal to allow the strings to
sing, indeed to sound like orchestral sings as opposed to members of a village
folk band, and what sounded very much to me – I could not see the pit – like employment
of different, so-called ‘Baroque’ bows. There were moments, especially solo
moments, when the ENO strings seemed to regain control, but they really should
not have to play with both hands metaphorically tied behind their backs. If we
are to have the rare, priceless advantage of modern strings, then for goodness
sake let them be used. The blend with recorders was often problematic, as it always
tends to be; modern flutes would have been a far better choice. Trumpets and a
variety of drums alleviated the worst of the vibrato-less tyranny.

What of the singers? The Mercure galant enthused of Marie Le
Rochois, a veteran of Lully’s 1686 Armide,
to which score and libretto make reference and allusion on numerous occasions:

The passions are so vivid, particularly
in Médée, that when this role was but declaimed it did not fail to make a great
impression on the listeners. Mlle Rochois, one of the best singers in the world
and who performs with warmth, finesse and intelligence, shone in this role and
made the most of its beauties. All of Paris is enchanted...

How would Sarah Connolly
match up? Very well indeed. There were moments earlier on when I wondered
whether the role was quite suited to her voice, some of its richness lost on
account of the range. However, from the point of her summoning the spirits
onwards, such doubts were triumphantly banished. The part became Connolly’s, in
dramatic and musical terms equally; there was no doubt about where one’s
sympathies lay, however horrific her crime. Katherine Manley’s Créuse offered
an excellent foil, necessarily a poor second to Médée, yet beautifully sung and
acted, and capable of eliciting a degree or two of sympathy herself. Likewise
Roderick Williams’s typically subtle, intelligent portrayal of Oronte, though
as in every case, one could not help but wonder what he might have sounded like
in French, Christopher Cowell’s English translation making a good stab at an
impossible task. Brindley Sherratt’s Créon offered a well-judged blend of
hubris and haplessness. Many of the singers in smaller roles shone too, for
instance Rhian Lois and Aoife O’Sullivan as the confidantes of Médee and
Créuse. Choral singing was excellent too. The sole fly in the ointment was
Jeffrey Francis’s quite unheroic Jason. There may be a good case for
deconstruction of heroism in this case, but there needs to be a degree of
construction in the first place. The role sat unhelpfully for his voice, but
stage presence was lacking too.

Three cheers are certainly
due to ENO for this foray into pre-Ramellian tragédie lyrique. Would it not be a wonderful thing to hear some
Lully next? Or indeed, to move forward to Gluck? Let such further explorations,
however, be the province of a director who would take form and drama with but a
modicum of greater seriousness.

Friday, 15 February 2013

This paper was given at the recent Wagner World Wide conference at the University of South Carolina. It gives a little taste of what will be in the chapter on Henze in my forthcoming book, to be published at the end of this year by Boydell and Brewer, though that will of course both be more detailed and more wide-ranging. I should normally remove, or rather not include, footnotes here, but have retained them, in case they are of any help to someone seeking the sources.

Hans Werner Henze was born in 1926,
in Gütersloh, Westphalia, growing up in a village thirty kilometres from
Bielefeld, which he would occasionally be able to visit for musical events. He
saw himself as having been triply cursed. Not only was he a German, but a
German cut off from the preferable ‘south German, Bohemian, and Austrian world
of sun and pleasure,’ and also – important for his experience both during and
after the war – a German homosexual in what was, to put it mildly, an
unfriendly climate.[1] He felt
scarred by seeing his father, an apparently liberal schoolmaster, become
transformed into not just a party member, but a Nazi enthusiast. Conscripted
during total war, he eventually spent several months as a prisoner of war.
Henze began to feel, as a German,
responsible for the sufferings of the entire continent and sickened by the attitude
of many of his countrymen. He would write, concerning his return to Bielefeld:

The crimes
committed in the concentration camps were now being talked about more or less
openly, resulting in a growing sense of shame and horror. No one had known a
thing. Everyone had been against it. The men and women of the occupying armies
looked disbelievingly at us Germans, or their eyes were filled with loathing.
Ever since then I have felt ashamed of our country and of my fellow Germans and
our people. Wherever my travels have taken me, my origins – my nationality –
have always caused me problems, even in Italy. Nor is it any wonder, since
the devils who dragged us into this war did such unforgivable and unforgettable
things to our neighbours, especially in Rome, not only in their persecution of
the Jews but also following Mussolini’s fall from power and during the
subsequent partisan struggles.[2]

For him, moreover, ‘German art – especially
the middle-class, nationalistic art of the nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries – became insufferable and suspect’.[3]
There are no prizes for guessing that Wagner’s music might fall under that
rubric, especially given the strong ties between the Bayreuth Festival and
Hitler himself. The weight of tradition had grown steadily after Beethoven,
notoriously making Brahms so loath, even for a lengthy period unable, to
complete a first symphony. Johann Nikolaus Forkel, in his celebrated 1802
biography of Bach, had portrayed the composer as the musical equivalent of the
classical texts upon which German humanist curricula were founded. Bach, the
‘first classic that ever was, or perhaps ever will be,’ was ‘an invaluable
national patrimony, with which no other nation has anything else to be
compared’.[4]
The posthumous role, then, played thereafter by Bach, Beethoven, and more controversially,
Wagner, as German national heroes is well known. Yet, as Thomas Mann,after whose Doctor Faustus Henze would later composer his Third Violin
Concerto, knew all too well, there was a difficult, complicated relationship
between such musical heroism and Friedrich Meinecke’s ‘German
catastrophe’.What remained was the
modernist art proscribed by the Nazis, untainted by association; what had
previously been condemned as abstract, degenerate, un-German, and of course
Jewish, now offered the opportunity for redemption of German music: a message
for ‘outsiders’ that would never leave Henze and would inform the construction,
conscious or otherwise, of his image.

For National Socialism had
prevented German musicians, composers included, for the first time in centuries
from keeping in touch with the latest musical developments. Thus for composers
such as Henze and the young Stockhausen, the International Summer School for
New Music in Darmstadt, founded in 1946, offered the opportunity to catch up.
The occupying powers, subsequently West Germany’s allies, were generally happy
to encourage and indeed to subsidise the ‘break’ with the country’s past,
although reconstruction, as in other areas of German cultural life, was
encouraged too. Moreover, the increasing ‘anti-formalist’ hostility towards
twelve-note and serialist works from the East German authorities with their
approved ‘socialist realism’ gave an opportunity for an allegedly ‘free’ West
to distinguish itself from so-called ‘totalitarianism’ not only past but
present. These factors give a number of clues as to why the more politically
committed composers such as Henze might eventually find themselves out on
something of a limb. How might they reconcile membership of the avant-garde
with their political commitment, given that the avant-garde seemed increasingly
apolitical or even reactionary? For Western European composers of all
nationalities, the strictness of Webern’s apparently hermetic compositional
method, somehow divorced from his utterly German context, provided the
denationalised precedent – or at least so did a ‘productive misreading’, as it
has generally come to be known, of his music. Even the fact of Webern’s
shooting in 1945 somehow seemed to ‘fit’ the myth-making requirements of new
music. The problem, at least for some, was that in practice this had begun to
veer towards a doctrinaire, almost totalitarian attitude on the part of the
high priests of the avant-garde. Henze connected this with a revisiting of the
catastrophic German past and contrasted it with the freedom of his immersion in
Italian life. The tragic irony was that the attempt to nullify the past, or
perhaps in some cases to ignore it, led to its return. His recounting the first
performance of his Nachtstücke und Arien in 1957 is instructive of the
chasm that had opened:

… three
representatives of the other wing – Boulez, my friend Gigi Nono and Stockhausen
– leapt to their feet after only the first few bars and pointedly left the
hall, eschewing the beauties of my latest endeavours. … I suddenly found
ourselves [that is, he and Ingeborg Bachmann, who provided the texts]
cold-shouldered by people who actually knew us … There was a sense of
indignation throughout the building, no doubt made worse by the fact that the
audience had acclaimed our piece in the liveliest manner… The impression arose
that the whole of the world of music had turned against me, a situation that
was really quite comical, but also somewhat disturbing from an ethical point of
view: for what had become of artistic freedom? Who had the right to confuse
moral and æsthetic criteria?[5]

This conflict between freedom and
authority, and the question of what freedom might really entail, is dramatised
in Henze’s opera, Der Prinz von Homburg (‘The Prince of Homburg’), which
has its origins in Kleist’s Prinz Friedrich von Homburg, a surprisingly
militaristic, indeed Prussian, text for either Henze or his librettist,
Ingeborg Bachmann. Needless to say, many modifications are made. Der Prinz
von Homburg was first performed in 1960, Henze provocatively claiming his
model to be nineteenth-century Italian opera.’[6] Verdi
and Donizetti seemed at least as much his anti-Wagners as inspirations in
themselves. ‘Every bar,’ he would write, ‘reveals Verdi’s influence as a music
dramatist.’[7] Such
remarks, such intentional implicit criticism of Wagner, could certainly never
have emanated from Schoenberg, his circle, nor from anyone seeking to position
himself in the role of successor to the Second Viennese School. The claim of an
‘Italian model’ was indeed largely rhetorical, for Henze also tells us that the
drama ‘very much cried out for this contrast between dodecaphony and what –
with a pinch of salt – might be termed traditional harmony: the dialectics of
the law and its violation, of dreams and reality, of mendaciousness and truth.’[8] One
could also point to the Nietzschean dialectic – actually Wagnerian in origin –
between Apollo and Dionysus. This is all thoroughly Germanic, not Italian at
all, but so of course is the desire to escape from Germany to the warm
Meditteranean south. Henze’s words are thoroughly German.

Needless to say, many modifications
are made; the Prince’s battle-cry, ‘In Staub mit allen Feinden Brandenburgs,’
bidding Brandenburg’s foes return to dust, no longer plays a role of
jubilation, quite otherwise, in Bachmann’s and Henze’s conception, which might
be understood to echo Brecht’s earlier (1939) rewriting, a sonnet upon the
play, the prince lying not dead but ‘on his back with all the foes of
Brandenburg in the dust’.[9] As
Frederic Jameson remarked in that very context, ‘where American pop psychology
would evoke adaptation, Brecht overtly specifies learning.’[10]
So do Bachmann and Henze, knowing, or at least believing, not unlike Wagner
with his mediæval sources, that their audience will be aware of the ‘original’,
though without going to the extreme of making appreciation dependent upon that
knowledge, without tending to the world, as it were, of meta-art. To present
march rhythms on the harp, for instance, rather than trumpets and drums, seems in context a statement, an inversion, in
itself, both of pacification and of passive aggression against the political (and
æsthetic) authorities that had brought the world to war and might do so again

The first two scenes of Henze’s
second act are punctuated by the repetition of distorted brass fanfares, as
Friedrich realises that he is hemmed in: ‘I am lost’, he sings.(Unfortunately, I do not have time to play an
excerpt.) Nothing changes; what can he do? He has broken the law in order to
attain victory for the Elector of Brandenburg, and death will be his reward.
The contrast between twelve-note technique and Henze’s ‘traditional harmony’
evokes not only musical but also dramatic crisis – and, in a broader sense, the
dialectic of crisis between the modern subject and the objective world.
Meanwhile, the ‘modern’ quality of the fanfares suggests the powerlessness of
the subject in relation to the fatal power of the state and its laws. Always we
seem to return to the opening scene of this act, to Friedrich’s powerless
plight. In Henze’s own words:

Der Prinz von Homburg… sets itself against the blind unimaginative application of
laws, in favour of an exaltation of human kindness, an understanding of which
reaches into deeper and more complex realms than would be ‘normal’ and which
seeks to find a place for a man in this world even though he is a Schwärmer and
a dreamer, or perhaps because of that.[11]

Are the laws of Brandenburg as
impervious as those of Schoenberg and, after him and deadlier still, Darmstadt,
let alone those of the Third Reich, being reconstructed before their eyes?
Could things actually be otherwise, without a radical transformation of society
as a whole? That brings us to the question of intention. Henze claimed:

I have striven for greater freedom,
or at least what I understand by it: certainly not improvisation, but
independence, and a preparedness for decisions outside established categories.
Music is not musicology, and the logic of a work rests on a unique
constellation of incident, encounter, experience, agreement; it transcends
inherited rules, construction, calculation. It seems that the vegetative
element of music surpasses its other, lesser, musicological dimension, and
that, as in the life of the Prince of Homburg, illuminations and discoveries
take place in dreams, not in the laboratory. Not, however, in a state of
haziness, but in the wakefulness of sleepwalkers, where facts are perceived
with abnormal clarity.[12]

There is something Romantic about
this; we might imagine ourselves returned to Wagner’s Nuremberg. Walther’s
Prize Song was conceived in a dream, although it then had to be refined by the
Master, Hans Sachs. Moreover, Walther’s songs also transcended inherited rules
and calculation, outstepped established categories. Henze’s drama throws up
another Meistersinger problem. Where is the social world; where is the
public nature of art? A dream is all very well, but without transmission and
reception it remains but a dream.

International climax was arguably
centred upon the triumphant 1966 premiere of The Bassarids at the Salzburg Festival – Karajan’s
citadel, no less. Aware of Henze’s hostility towards much Wagner, his
librettist WH Auden had coaxed him very much in that direction, insisting that
he study the score of Götterdämmerung – Henze always had less of a
problem with Tristan, and
indeed would write his own Tristan-work
himself – and even had him attend a performance in Vienna, where he met Adorno,
incidentally, intently studying his score, in order, according to his
autobiography, that he should ‘learn to overcome’ his ‘aversions to Wagner’s
music, aversions bound up in no small measure with my many unfortunate
experiences in the past’. And, of course, with Germany’s many unfortunate
experiences in the all-too-recent past. Success was at best mixed. According to
his autobiography:

I was
perfectly capable of judging the wider significance of Wagner’s music: as any
fool can tell you, it is a summation of all Romantic experience … But I simply
cannot abide this silly and self-regarding emotionalism, behind which it is
impossible not to detect a neo-German mentality and ideology. There is the
sense of an imperialist threat, of something militantly nationalistic,
something disagreeably heterosexual and Aryan in all these rampant horn calls,
this pseudo-Germanic Stabreim, these incessant chords of a seventh and
all the insecure heroes and villains that people Wagner’s librettos.[13]

The result was nevertheless in many
respects Henze’s most Wagnerian drama, and one which he considered confronted
‘this “I was always against the Nazis”’ position, ‘a banal and frivolous stance
(created on … stage in the last scene…)’.[14]
At the time, Henze was willing to consider that the musical path from Tristan,
at least, might be of some importance in his work. In an interview for Die
Welt, marking the premiere, he proclaimed his belief ‘that the road from Tristan
to Mahler and Schoenberg is far from finished, and with The Bassarids I have
tried to go further along it.’[15]
Moreover, he could claim impeccable musical and German warrant for what many
would decry as the score’s eclecticism:

It may be
unfashionable to continue musical traditions in this way [he is specifically
referring to the use of symphonic forms in the opera’s four ‘movements’], but
with Goethe under my pillow, I’m not going to lose any sleep about the
possibility of being accused of eclecticism. Goethe’s definition ran: ‘An
eclectic … is anyone who, from that which surrounds him, takes what corresponds
to his nature.’ If you wanted to do so, you could count Bach, Mozart, Verdi,
Wagner, Mahler, and Stravinsky as eclectics …[16]

The composer could not, should not,
‘spend all his time destroying language instead of developing it
dialectically’.[17]

That said, the very success of the
opera in so bourgeois a context troubled Henze, that unease not merely
coincidental with his political move from what he would call ‘generalised
anti-fascism’, inspired, he explained, by the example of Italian Marxist
friends. He had intervened politically, not least in 1965 during Willy Brandt’s
election campaign, but now, from Rudi Dutschke and his comrades he ‘now learned
to see contexts, and to see myself within those contexts’. This was why he took
the decision that he would write not for himself and his friends, but ‘to help
socialism’, that he would embody in his work ‘all the problems of contemporary
bourgeois music,’ and yet ‘transform these into something that the masses can
understand’. This certainly did not involve submitting to commercial
considerations, but nor was there any ‘place for worry about losing elite
notions of value’.[18]
In September 1968, Henze published a declaration, ‘Mein Standpunkt’, ending:

Unnecessary
are new museums, opera houses, and world premieres. Necessary, to set about the
realisation of dreams. Necessary, to abolish the dominion of men over men.
Necessary, to change mankind, which is to say: necessary, the creation of
mankind’s greatest work of art: the World Revolution.[19]

Those words could almost have come
straight from an earlier German revolutionary-composer’s pen, from Wagner’s
1849 Die Revolution.[20] Henze
had by this time lent his support to the APO (the Ausserparlamentarische
Opposition) and the SDS (the Socialist German Student-league).

This brings us to Der
langwierige Weg in die Wohnung der Natascha Ungeheuer, entitled a ‘show for
seventeen performers’, rather than an opera. Work began in January 1971, when
Henze and some friends recorded street sounds near the Zoo Station in West Berlin, along with newspaper extracts read onto tape
at varying tempi and pitches. The text’s author was a Chilean poet, Gastón
Salvatore, who had been an active participant as a member of the Socialist
German Student-league in the events of 1968, was imprisoned for a few months
thereafter, and was Salvador Allende’s nephew. It is worth quoting from
Salvatore’s account, which introduces the printed score:

Natascha
Ungeheuer is the siren of a false utopia. She promises the leftist bourgeois a
new kind of security, which will permit him to preserve his revolutionary
‘class conscience’ without taking an active part in class warfare. This false
Utopia should be regarded as an all-denying immobility, as a kind of cowardice,
which permits itself to appear identified with the ‘Revolution’ and believe
that such an identity could equal the consummation of revolution.

Such an existentialistic,
non-historical form of political self-reflection places the leftist bourgeois
in the position of exploiting the proletarian struggle, as an occasion for a
merely self-indulgent moralising. He ‘muddles through’ between the temptation
either to surrender consciousness and return to the bourgeoisie or to choose
one of the two possible forms of helplessness: either that of the lonely
Avant-garde in their homes or that of Social Democracy.

Natascha Ungeheuer promises both
possibilities. The leftist bourgeois sets out for her apartment, plagued by all
the anxieties and insecurities which characterise his social position ...
Natascha Ungeheuer knows ... [them] only too well. She torments him, she
provokes him, yet at the same time she lures him into her apartment ...

The leftist bourgeois ... refuses to
go the full way to the apartment of Natascha Ungeheuer. He has not yet
discovered his way to the revolution. He knows that he must turn back on the
way he has gone so far, and begin again.

Everything about the work – its
ideological intention, its music, and its staging – was calculated to provoke,
and it was roundly booed when performed at West Berlin’s impeccably bourgeois
Deutsche Oper.

The musical forces required are a
vocalist – a baritone of sorts – a brass quintet, a Hammond organ, percussion,
a jazz ensemble, allegedly redolent of the Berlin underground, though perhaps a
few decades late, and, perhaps most notably, denoting the bourgeois origins of
the protagonist, an instrumental quintet (piano, flute, clarinet, viola, and cello)
identical to that used in Schoenberg’s Pierrot lunaire. Here is sickly,
decadent, bourgeois expressionism. (Here, I might personally add, is the more
compelling music; perhaps Henze spoke more truly than he realised.) To
underline the already heavy symbolism, Henze, who also directed the first
performances, had the Pierrot quintet – Peter Maxwell Davies’s Fires of
London – dress in blood-soaked white coats, each member sporting a different
physical injury: ‘one with eye bandaged,’ presumably a coincidental homage to
Wotan, ‘another his leg and yet another his arm in plaster of Paris, etc.,
etc.’ Once again, conflict between different sound worlds, representing
different aspects of the political and social situation is readily apparent in what is notably called a deutsches Lied, a German song.

[

text and
translation at end]

In a 1972 interview, Henze also
made an interesting connection with his experience of Italian opera and the
physicality of the human voice he experienced in that, and implicitly not in
German tradition:

When I wrote my
first opera, Boulevard Solitude in 1951 – it had its premiere the
following year – 50 per cent of it was dance. The singers were treated in
rather a statuesque manner because I didn't believe in the traditional
movements for them. I overcame that view when I saw Italian opera and I
realised that the physical presence of music in a human body is much stronger
in a singer because of his voice. This process of making music physically
present is still concerning me today. In Cimarrón and Natascha
Ungeheuer, I make even the musicians visible and they more or less become
actors. I think I will pursue this line.[21]

The score tells us that ‘the work
can be performed in gymnasiums, in the open air or on concert platforms.’ Yet,
the opera house, or at least the theatre, retains a certain primacy. ‘When
performed on the stage, dance elements and lighting effects can be increased.
It is conceivable to blend in films and to add to the scenic actions.’ Shorn of
the optionality and translated into Hegelian, Henze’s notes might come from
Wagner’s Opera and Drama. This is a Gesamtkunstwerk of the early 1970s,
however much Henze might have wished to escape Wagner’s legacy.

The protagonist’s predicament was
clearly Henze’s own: stuck somewhere between Natascha’s flat in Kreuzberg and the
German bourgeoisie which, even during his self-exile, had funded so many of his
activities to date – and would continue to do so. However, most of his audience
had not even begun its journey. In Henze’s words, ‘our hero does not reach his
destination: but … he hears in his head the sirenlike voice of Comrade
Natascha, who, far from welcoming and accommodating, reels off a list of objections
to him.’ Has nagging Fricka been resurrected, post-Götterdämmerung, to assail our artist-Wotan? ‘Attempts to renew his
bourgeois connections prove a failure. It is a lonely show that our hero
stages.’[22] Having
turned back from the former, he does not return to the latter, though it
remains quite unclear what will happen next. Such would be the besetting yet
fruitful problematic of Henze’s career and œuvre.

L’Upupa
und der Triumph der Sohnesliebe, another Salzburg commission (2003), would
be in character if not in form his Singspiel,
a loving tribute to the composer of Die
Zauberflöte. However, despite its debts to Wagner and to Berg, Henze still
did not feel comfortable with an unalloyed tribute to the former and never
really would; Mozart was for many reasons more approachable. And yet, in an
unguarded moment during a 2010 interview, shortly before the British premiere
of his penultimate opera, Phaedra,
Henze would aver, ‘German music,
it’s difficult to match isn’t it? It’s so rich and so deep and has inspired so
many adventures – and still can, I believe.’[23]
If he had not yet made peace with German politics – and why should he have done
so in the age of Merkel any more than during the era of Adenauer? – then the
richness of his engagement with German music, and more broadly German history
and culture, would never be in doubt.